By Kira Lu ’20 and Justine Seo ’19, Feature Editors

With the many teachers joining NA this year, we’ve decided to conduct a series of articles introducing some of these new members of the community! We hope you enjoy our first interview with Mr. Vallone!

It’s a rainy, humid Monday in Livingston, New Jersey.  We’re in the Physics wing of Newark Academy, a bright yellow hallway where you can catch glimpses of students eating lunch or working out pendulum labs.  This school year, there’s been an addition to the hallway: Mr. Vallone, the new Physics, Engineering, and Robotics teacher. Neither of us have Mr. Vallone as our teacher this year, so we decided to enter the Vallone zone to get to know him better.   A Ravenclaw who loves fusion in stars, the deterministic elements of physics, and the 2006 Denzel Washington heist film, Inside Man, Mr. Vallone is a man of many interests, and we’re delighted to have been able to get to know a little more about him!

Justine: So how are you enjoying the school so far?

Mr. Vallone: I’m liking it a lot! It’s great! The students are great, and that makes my job way easier.

One thing you should know about us is that along with being Physics enthusiasts, we are also big fans of comedy. So we decided to ask Mr. Vallone if he could give us some material for our joke collections.

Kira: Tell us your favorite physics joke!
Mr. Vallone: My favorite physics joke? I’ll give you the abbreviated version. So there’s a king, and his son is dying. And he reaches out to all the smartest people in the land and he’s like, “my son’s dying of this illness.” So he gets a biologist and the biologist says “I can’t find any sort of bacteria or anything causing this illness.” So the king cuts off his head. Done. Then he brings in a chemist and the chemist states“He hasn’t been poisoned, I don’t see anything chemically wrong with him.” All right. Done with you. Kills him, gets rid of him. And the physicist spends days and days pouring over notes and writing this long, elaborate paper and he finally exclaims, “I’ve done it, I’ve solved it” and he drops dead from exhaustion and the king picks up this thesis that the physicist has written and it says, “Assume the boy is a sphere in a frictionless vacuum.”

Justine and Kira: Haha!

Mr. Vallone: The idea of being that all physics problems take place in this abject reality where we don’t have air resistance, everything’s a sphere, gravity points exactly the direction we want it to, it’s a completely empty universe devoid of everything except for this spherical object that’s falling in a frictionless vacuum. Yeah.

We also found out some more about Mr. Vallone’s life outside of Physics and Newark Academy.

Kira: What is your favorite non-physics related activity?
Mr. Vallone: I love strategy games, I love skiing, and ultimate frisbee.

Justine: I’m scared of skiing.

Mr. Vallone: Yeah?
Justine: Yeah, I went once, and I went on the bunny hill and then I fell. And then I had to carry my skis down, and I just walked down because I didn’t want to go down on my skis.

Mr. Vallone: Alright. Very simple. Everyone can do it.

Kira: Once I tried snowboarding, and it was just not good.

Mr. Vallone: Snowboarding is a lot harder. I worked as a ski instructor this previous winter and one thing I heard a lot of the other instructors say is skiing is pretty shaky for one day, and then you’re good for the next two years of skiing, and then it becomes increasingly difficult. Exponentially difficult. Whereas snowboarding you fall down a lot for two years straight and then after that everything’s easy.

Kira: Is there a rivalry or something between skiers and snowboarders? Cause that’s what all my friends say.

Justine: That would be so funny.

Kira: All my friends are like “I hate snowboarders.”

Justine: Oh and all the instructors battle?
Mr. Vallone: I mean, no, because most of the skiing instructors are retired people and most of the snowboarding instructors are twenty five year olds so… they don’t interact with each other a lot. There’s a general passive disdain. But we’re all in the same locker room.

Justine and Kira: Haha!

Of course, we had to ask his opinion on the Newark Academy school lunch.

Justine: What are some foods you like?

Mr. Vallone: Foods? Nachos. Stir fries.

Kira: What was your favorite NA lunch so far?

Mr. Vallone: The egg rolls were good!

Finally, we found out more about who Mr. Vallone is as a person.

Kira: Is there a quote or saying that you live your life by?

Mr. Vallone: I came across this quote yesterday, I think. But I think it very accurately describes sort of a philosophy that I’ve been living my life by for the past two or three years, which is “don’t let the perfect stand in the way of the good.” In the case of the quote, it’s for fear of not being perfect, you won’t attempt to do something and be good at it. Which is absurd. There’s no need to be perfect at everything. That would be ridiculous. If everything was binary, where you did everything either one hundred percent or zero percent, a lot of things wouldn’t get done. Nobody can do something a hundred percent, everytime, always, for everything. You know, if you can’t brush your teeth perfectly, does that mean you shouldn’t brush your teeth? No, that means you go to the dentist twice a year and get your teeth cleaned. You don’t go to the dentist every day to get your teeth cleaned, that’s ridiculous. And I think it was a real issue for me; if I couldn’t do it to some artificial degree of goodness, maybe not perfect but you know, fifth percentile or whatever, I wasn’t doing it. And that created a lot of challenges for me in life, and that was very hard. And I sort of realized this. And as I said I play a lot of strategy games and I lose all the time. And I don’t not win by the highest degree, I lose. And that’s fine, I don’t care about that. Losing is part of winning. You have to not let the perfect stand in the way of the good.

Thank you, Mr. Vallone, for the thoughtful responses! We enjoyed getting to know him in our interview and we hope all of you will learn something new about Mr. Vallone!